Joggers, socks, shorts, t-shirt et voila. Mr. SoccerFit says that’s all I’ll be needing today. I could have also brought along my brother’s old but trusty size 5 Paul’s Warehouse-soccer ball, but I wasn’t sure it would be good enough as it has recently grown a tiny nose – Mr. SoccerFit later tells me that it would have been fine. I might brave the fight for space on public transport next time and bring my nose-ball.
The green spread of the playing area greets my office-sore eyes. While the sky has been a little weepy, the ground isn’t sodden and Mr. SoccerFit has thoughtfully sent round a confirmation SMS to let everyone know that SoccerFit is still on that afternoon. In any case I’m not going to let a little damp grass get in the way of my introduction to the world of soccer, or fitness, or at least my attempt to get there.
As I approach I spot our trainer bouncing a ball up and down on his knees while talking to a girl with a blond ponytail – who is dressed in much groovier soccer regalia than my own (obviously someone who has played for a club before). I get closer and see that she is pulling her socks up over shin pads. Wow, she looks tough. I’ve only got anklets.
“Hello! Is this SoccerFit?”
“Yes, you’ve come to the right place.” the trainer smiles at me. “This is Mira. ” He stopped juggling for a moment to introduce the pretty girl, decked out in black gear, who looks like she means business, soccer business. He continued, “This will be the first lesson for everyone in this group, so you’ll all be in the same boat here. I’ll be coaching you this afternoon.”
After some preliminary chit-chat about the weather, and exchanging stories of how we heard about SoccerFit (me, through a friend who plays in Coogee; Mira via a friend who’s played in the city) and if we’ve ever played soccer before (me, no, unless you count a couple of PE games at my all-girls high-school where five girls kicked a ball around a field while another 15 class-members feigned moving around in shady patches). More SoccerFit people soon arrived and we got started on warming-up and stretching. We then went straight into the technique drills that take up the first half of the session.
I say technique drills, but they were sweat-inducing jogs up and down the field that required us to reach down to touch the grass, skip sideways in a line, change directions, change directions again then jump up to pretend to head a ball… etc. We dribbled balls around cones with different parts of our feet, passed balls to a partner, attempted to dribble our balls past our partner, and finally tried some group-passing exercises. With all the passing drills, the trainer made us yell the name of the person to whom we were sending the ball; this turned out to be handy preparation for ball-passes in the second half of the class: a noisy game of basic-rules soccer.
The basic-rules for our SoccerFit game included:
- no balls above waist height (a protective measure for beginners like me),
- only two consecutive touches of the ball permitted per player (to prevent ball-hogging, or rather to encourage ball-sharing),
- no scoring from beyond the half-way line (not sure why?), and
- no contact (thank god, that Mira girl was nice but still tough).
Apart from some anxious moments of not being entirely sure in which direction I was supposed to be scoring (we’d just changed direction and I was adrenalin-charged), I managed to score one goal and I was left feeling more delightfully exhausted and sweaty than I’d been for possibly a year! I was a little winded but mostly amazed. This was going to be brilliant exercise.
After our warm-down, we packed up shop, someone kindly handing me a WetOne and a stick of gum, and another person offering a few of us a lift to the train station. What a nice group of people. I would certainly be coming back for more.
To visit the SoccerFit website, please click here
